THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Film scene veteran Jon Behrens paints, dyes, solarizes, and bleaches film – and by the way, there is no film

By Michelle Michael

Active in avant-garde filmmaking since 1979, Jon Behrens realized after “doing the whole festival thing in the 80s and 80s, that the film festival circuit was a racket.” But while he sits in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill looking through rose-colored sunglasses, he adds that the appearance of his new short in SIFF this year is due to a personal invitation from the curators.

Like all of his films, Behrens shot The Production and Decay of Strange Particles on 16mm, seemingly the only conventional aspect of his work. Composing his visual mini operas by hand-altering the film itself and editing with his almost archaic upright moviolo editing apparatus. As his new piece makes clear, he uses film in the same way a painter uses canvas, making him hardly a “filmmaker” in any traditional sense.

Behrens’ experimental uses of media contain no characters, narrative or message. This raises a question of marketability for Behrens, who admits he was “anti-festival for a while,” although he has screened internationally. The only subject in his film is celluloid.

Applying inks, dyes, and chemicals to the film, he mainly films the film itself. He relies on his JK optical printer, a device used to re-photograph images from multiple overlaid exposures, in a technique often termed “direct animation.”

“If you mention the optical printer,” he says, “Make sure you mention it was my friend Brandon Schaffer who loaned it to me. He let me use it for 6 months at a time. Finally he sold to me.”

The moviolo and optical printer that now dominate his living room give him “the freedom to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and be myself” while he uses them to design his visual thoughts.

“I get a lot of comments on the colors and crackly images on my films,” he adds. The optical printer frame by frame affects bleed-ins, bleed-outs, dissolves and fades. Another element he uses is solarization, a technique in which film is exposed to light during the development process. The result is the embossed, almost textured look he is known for, creating what he calls “personal cinema.”

“The 911 Media Arts Center was one of the first venues to show my films,” says Behrens, whose first project was a “film poem” of a Clash concert titled Punk Rock Sphincter. He would eventually go on to screen his films internationally, but remembers the days when proper venues were scarce and he screened before bands, in coffee shops, and in porno theaters.

Even though the Seattle native’s chosen medium provides him the opportunity of broadcasting to large audiences, Behrens doesn’t concern himself with analysis or political and personal messages. The Production and Decay of Strange Particles is meant to express only the aesthetics of the medium, the equipment, and the camera.

“I reworked existing film by protecting parts of it with latex paint, and using bleach to remove the emulsion around the film,” says Behrens of his new work. He then painted the film with Kenville dyes, before re-photographing them with the optical printer.

Other works by Behrens include The Anomalies of the Unconscious, which features a score by the band Negativland and appears on their 2007 DVD compilation Our Favorite Things.

Despite a stated lack of interest in digital media, Behrens is preparing a DVD compilation of his films from 1987 to 2007, due out this October. His works are usually distributed on 16mm by Canyon Cinema, one of the largest independent film distributors in the US.

As for his next project, Behrens plans to adhere dragonfly wings to the film and incorporate stained-glass dyes to his repertoire. While “SIFF has become more commercially motivated in recent years,” Behrens says optimistically that “the festival is going back to more local filmmakers and is getting better.”